Match Up Shows Trump Would Have Beat Obama In Election

Tim Alberta wrote a piece for the National Review showing that in a hypothetical match-up between Donald Trump and Barack Obama, Trump would have won the election by a small margin.

Alberta argues that Clinton didn’t lose because she failed to get the democratic base to show up, she lost because Trump was able to get Republican voters to show up in large numbers in key battleground states.

Clinton pulled about the same numbers as Obama in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, and New Hampshire and even surpassed Obama’s 2012 vote total in Florida, a state that Obama won.

In the 2012 election Obama received 6 million more votes than Trump did in 2016, but Trump received more votes than Obama in the battleground states.

Alberta says “This obviously is an apples-to-oranges exercise because no two elections are the same, nor are any two electorates. Still, unlike debating whether the 2016 Cubs would defeat the 1927 Yankees, this is not an entirely abstract argument; a comparison of their respective performances in the country’s most competitive states shows Trump edging Obama in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup.”

Alberta’s match-up and logic for a Trump victory over Obama can be seen Here:

FLORIDA — 29 EVs — 98 percent reporting

Obama 2012: 4,235,270

Clinton 2016: 4,485,745

Romney 2012: 4,162,081

Trump 2016: 4,605,515

Conclusion: Trump beats Obama by some 370,000 votes and wins Florida. (Note: Clinton herself won 250,000 more votes in Florida than Obama did in 2012.)

PENNSYLVANIA — 20 EVs — 97 percent reporting

Obama 2012: 2,907,448

Clinton 2016: 2,844,705

Romney 2012: 2,619,583

Trump 2016: 2,912,941

Conclusion: Trump squeezes past Obama by a margin of some 5,000 votes and wins Pennsylvania. (Note: Clinton runs about 60,000 votes behind Obama, but would’ve had more than enough to defeat Romney in 2012.)

A review of the Romney 2012 states confirms that Trump, in this hypothetical matchup, would have carried every single one against Obama.

It doesn’t matter that Obama would have trounced Trump by nearly 300,000 votes in Michigan; by more than 200,000 in Wisconsin; by 175,000 in Virginia; and by 160,000 in Colorado. It’s similarly meaningless that Obama would have narrowly defeated Trump in Iowa, Nevada, and New Hampshire. The 44th president carried all of those states in 2012, and in this hypothetical contest, he would successfully defend all of them. But it wouldn’t be enough.

The Electoral College would produce a razor-thin margin: Trump 273, Obama 265.